Saraswati Puja

THE BENGALI HINDU almanacs had deemed that this year’s Saraswati Puja would be observed from the early-afternoon of February 2. For me, this was extremely inconvenient and meant rushing back to Kolkata from Israel, a land from where convenient flights are still in short supply. Above all, it meant having to give up visits to Haifa and the Dead Sea—a colossal personal sacrifice.

However, there was no alternative. Returning to Kolkata for Saraswati Puja at home was obligatory. The family had been worshipping the Goddess of learning and the arts for as long as I can remember, and there was no question of me not being present on the occasion. Which was just as well because the puja is always the occasion to renew family ties and partake the traditional bhog—khichdi, a vegetable mash and chutney. In recent years, Saraswati Puja has also evolved into a Bengali Valentine’s Day, when young students in traditional yellow, get an opportunity to flirt outrageously with the opposite sex, without inviting disapproving looks of parents, relatives and neighbourhood busybodies. It is all very well choreographed, including the ceremonial initiation of children into the world of writing and reading.

Why an occasion that is so beautiful and completely inoffensive should be at the centre of any controversy is bewildering. However, each year and with alarming regularity, Saraswati Puja is being subjected to a volley of sectarian fire. It started about six years ago when a group of Muslim students declared that the puja would be allowed only if a public holiday was declared for a Muslim religious festival on a nearby date. The controversy escalated as many government schools broke with tradition and advised their students to conduct the puja outside the premises. Predictably, the reason cited was secularism.

This year in West Bengal, the issue was further politicised after a small-time Muslim activist of the ruling Trinamool Congress objected to a Saraswati Puja inside the premises of a government-run college in South Kolkata. The Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student organisation closest to BJP, did not have much of an organisation inside the college and wasn’t in any position to resist the Trinamool. However, BJP had enough clout in West Bengal to trigger outrage over the banishment of Ma Saraswati from the college premises. The outrage was genuine because in the eyes of the Bengali Hindu, Saraswati Puja was more a cultural occasion than a religious event. The two are of course inseparable.

However, in West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee has tried her best to underplay the religious dimension of occasions like Saraswati Puja and the grander Durga Puja and portray them as popular carnivals involving everyone of all faiths. She took inspiration from her communist predecessors who gave the pujas a miss but unfailingly put up book stalls selling communist literature at the venue. The Trinamool leadership doesn’t care much for book stalls but insists on exercising total control over every community puja. Other political parties are kept out, sometimes quite forcibly.

This year, there was a further twist in that tale when a social media post had it that Saraswati Puja was conducted in some corner of Santiniketan’s Visva-Bharati University. This, according to some rent-a-quote intellectuals living around the campus, violated the Bramho Samaj character of the institution that had been set up by Rabindranath Tagore. True, Tagore belonged to the monotheistic and Upanishadic Bramho Samaj and the prayers on the campus followed this tradition. However, Visva-Bharati was taken over by the Government of India sometime in the 1950s and while there was a commitment to maintain the original character of the institution, I don’t know whether this extended to banishing mainstream Hindu traditions from Santiniketan in perpetuity. If it did, it needs a review.

In the late 1930s, a similar controversy erupted over observing Saraswati Puja in a college in central Kolkata that was managed by members of the Bramho Samaj. The political leader of the time who came out most forcefully on the issue and led an agitation to remove the contrived walls of separation between the Sanatanis and the Brahmos was Subhas Chandra Bose. For him, too, Saraswati Puja was an occasion for all Bengalis. It was a national festival.

Bengali Valentine’s DaycultureIndian youthSaraswati PujaWest Bengal